New submitter gadfium writes: “Python 3.4 has been released. It adds new library features, bug fixes, and security improvements. It includes: at standardized implementation of enumeration types, a statistics module, improvements to object finalization, a more secure and interchangeable hash algorithm for strings and binary data, asynchronous I/O support, and an installer for the pip package manager.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Python 3.4 Released
We’ve known that most critters try to avoid power lines, but until recently, scientists were pretty much in the dark when it came to why . Now, it turns out that to animals, power lines and pylons look like terrifying bands of glowing, flashing bursts of light . Read more…
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Animals See Power Lines as Terrifying Bursts of Light
Toshiba just took the wraps off a medical breathalyzer that the company says can diagnose diseases by analyzing the air a patient exhales. “Bad breath” just took on a whole new meaning. Read more…
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Toshiba’s New Breathalyzer Diagnoses Diseases, Not Drunks
Cryonics enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that scientists have demonstrated the ability to revive frozen life not just after a couple years or even a couple of decades. They can bring something back to life that’s been frozen for fifteen centuries. The previous record was just 20 years. Read more…
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Scientists Revive Moss That Was Encased In Ice For 1,500 Years
EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10, 000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43, 000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it’s in better shape than a human body buried for six months. “The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved.” The mammoth’s intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they’ll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there’s a “high chance” that data would allow them to clone the mammoth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning
Trailrunner7 writes “A revamped early random number generator in iOS 7 is weaker than its vulnerable predecessor and generates predictable outcomes. A researcher today at CanSecWest said an attacker could brute force the Early Random PRNG used by Apple in its mobile operating system to bypass a number of kernel exploit mitigations native to iOS. ‘The Early Random PRNG in iOS 7 is surprisingly weak, ‘ said Tarjei Mandt senior security researcher at Azimuth Security. ‘The one in iOS 6 is better because this one is deterministic and trivial to brute force.’ The Early Random PRNG is important to securing the mitigations used by the iOS kernel. ‘All the mitigations deployed by the iOS kernel essentially depend on the robustness of the Early Random PRNG, ‘ Mandt said. ‘It must provide sufficient entropy and non-predictable output.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Weak Apple PRNG Threatens iOS Exploit Mitigations
destinyland writes “Wednesday the geeky cartoonist behind XKCD announced that he’d publish a new book answering hypothetical science questions in September. And within 24 hours, his as-yet-unpublished work had become Amazon’s #2 best-selling book. ‘Ironically, this book is titled What If?, ‘ jokes one blogger, noting it resembles an XKCD comic where ‘In our yet-to-happen future, this book decides to travel backwards through time, stopping off in March of 2014 to inform Amazon’s best-seller list that yes, in our coming timeline this book will be widely read…’ Randall Munroe’s new book will be collecting his favorite ‘What If…’ questions, but will also contain his never-before published answers to some questions that he’d found ‘particularly neat.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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XKCD Author’s Unpublished Book Has Already Become a Best-Seller
Are you a jealous lover, helicopter parent, or otherwise neurotic human being with crippling trust issues? Then we’ve got the answer to all your problems right here. No, it’s not therapy (although, you know, good idea); it’s a top-of-the-line smartphone that comes pre-loaded with all the spyware an overbearing human could ever hope for. Read more…
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Dear Creepers: You Can Buy a Smartphone Pre-Loaded With Spyware Now
You know kaiju, right? Those Japanese-style monsters now have their own watering hole, which serves booze and eats. There’s an important rule, though: No superheroes allowed. Don’t you dare break it! Read more…
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Get Drunk with Kaiju at This New Japanese Bar
itwbennett writes “As Slashdot readers will remember, last month the U.S government ‘petitioned the court system’ to let the NSA retain phone call metadata for more than 5 years, ironically ‘because it needs to preserve it as evidence for the various privacy lawsuits filed against the government.’ Well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ruled against that request. The FISC’s Presiding Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled Friday (PDF) that the proposed amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of U.S. persons whose ‘telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government for five years to aid in national security investigation.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Court Denies NSA Request To Hold Phone Records Beyond 5 Years